It was time to explore the basement. Leala let what she felt was an hour elapse. Judging by the increased volume from above it was late. The paper plate beside her bed held the day’s ration of cold frijoles refritos and uncooked tortillas de maiz. Needing strength for what lay ahead, Leala forced the tasteless food down her throat. The discoteca above me is very large, she thought. The basement will be very large as well. One could not gauge its size because, behind the heavy door of fence that prohibited escaping upstairs, the basement had been chopped into many tiny rooms. There was the central hall that was two meters wide, but from it were many tight passages, like tiny dark alleys. Sometimes the alleys led to other alleys, sometimes they stopped at a wall.
It was a laberinto.
She headed deeper into the labyrinth, where there was no light. Light came from bulbs in the ceiling, you pulled a string and could see. Leala waved her hand in the dark, found the string and pulled. She saw a dead end filled with fast-food bags and beer cans. An expired rat decomposed on the floor.
Leala inspected every passage that fell from the main hall, finding walls made of bricks, and walls of concreto. The latter would be the true walls of the foundation, the others added to make the little prisons. A passage from the basement to the outside, she reasoned, would go through a concrete wall.
Leala returned to a section of the foundation wall. The alley between it and the brick wall was as black as the bottom of a well. She took a deep breath and entered the dark, hands feeling both walls as she stepped down a path barely wider than her shoulders.
She was stepping ahead when her left hand fell into air, the wall no longer there. Leala touched ahead and to the right: walls. The path turned left. Leala followed it another several steps and nearly screamed when something touched her head. It went away, returned. She tentatively reached into the darkness.
A string. She tugged it and a bulb high in the joists came on. Another door of the heavy steel mesh was ahead, but the lock was hanging loose. The door swung open to a lit room. Against one wall were boxes labeled Frijoles Refritos and holding large cans of the dismal refried beans she was fed twice a day. A bin beside the boxes was over-filled with empty cans, tortilla bags and water bottles, the refuse spilling across the floor. Leala imagined the mean-eyed men filling plates with beans and tortillas before taking them to the prisoners.
The room smelled of fresh cigarette smoke. Someone had been here recently.
On the other side of the room was an opening and Leala stared down a tunnel twenty meters in length. At the far end was a series of concrete steps rising four meters, with a small platform at the top. And on the platform …
Yet another door.
Leala’s feet moved lightly through the tunnel. The door atop the stairs would be at street level, she knew. She crept up the steps and tried the handle. The door opened to the huge, windowless room of a brick warehouse. To her left was a small room with an open door, a toilet and sink inside. Several large crates were on the far side of the room, the nearer floor was cement and open save for a big white van, the words on its side saying A-1 Window Treatments. Behind the van a tall door reached to the ceiling.
Leala remembered the vehicle from the day she stepped onto America, when the others rode in the van but Orzibel flattered her into the big black car. She staunched anger at herself and stepped into the room. If there was a truck door, there must be a people door. She stepped forward.
“Voy a abrir la puerta!”
A voice froze her in the center of the floor. There, to her right, a man sat inside a little room with big glass windows. He was on the phone and if he turned but slightly, would see her. Leala stepped back behind the door with her beating heart so high in her throat she feared choking. The man in the windowed room had almost turned her way, but when the big door opened he had looked toward the portal.
She watched a neon green pickup truck pull next to the van, its bed stacked with brown cartons. Two men exited and Leala recognized one of them as the gangster type who brought the plates of miserable food. The men began unloading the cartons onto a two-wheeled cart. The other returned to his little office.
“Andale, Raoul … Hurry!” one man said. “Let’s make the delivery and get done. My pito has a hot date.”
“Your pito has a date with your hand. Why can’t we take the food through the club? Why roll it all this way?”
“The policía might see us pushing beans and tortillas into the club and wonder what they are for. It’s not a supper club. It is only a place for men to find women.”
“Ha! Who would look that close?”
“It is orders from the Amili one. Things have changed since her arrival. Muy cautious, that one.”
“I’ll bet she loses that caution in a bed. I would like to get her to my—”
“Be careful of what you wish. She must surely be the property of Mister Double O.”
“El Diablo! I will push the cart and wish no more.”
Leala retreated down the steps and compressed herself into the recess in the wall, praying the shadows kept her covered as the men wrestled the cart down the steps and rolled by. Fortune lay on Leala’s side, she thought. She had chosen to seek escape on a night when food was being delivered to the laberinto. Otherwise the back entrance would have been locked as tight as the front.
When the men entered the maze beneath the discoteca Leala ran up the steps. The watchman was not in the windowed room and the door to el baño was closed. Leala took a chance the man was relieving himself and ran to the office. As she had hoped, there was a door to the outside. She quietly slipped into hot air that smelled of stale beer and the exhaust of cars.
The night was painted in an electric rainbow, signs beating brightly from every direction. Leala looked for the discoteca, but the warehouse was between them and she was on a side street. On the corner was a building the color of a canary, PALM BREEZE MOTEL, its sign blared, HOURLY-DAILY-WEEKLY. Next to the motel lights proclaimed PAWN SHOP – OPEN ’TIL MIDNITE EVERY NITE. A bar was beside the pawnshop, no windows, just a sign saying PACKY’S HOT SPOT, BEER and LIQUOR. The street seemed paved with trash: newspapers, food wrappers, paper cups, beer cans, cigarette butts. The smell of urine and vomit rose like fog from the gutter.
A traffic signal changed down the block and the street filled with cars and trucks, horns and engines. A rusted station wagon rattled to the curb, the drunken driver leering out the window. “Hey chicka, how much por felación?” He mimed pushing a head into his lap.
“What?”
“I got twenny bucks, chicka. I meet you in the motel lot, no?”
Leala walked away as quickly as her legs would carry her, the drunk yelling at her back. The traffic was frightening and Leala turned past a closed bodega. Three men sat atop a car in its parking lot, drinking from bagged bottles. They hooted and whistled at Leala, but didn’t get up.
She kept moving.
Within minutes the clubs and motels and bars turned into tiny houses on palm-fronded lots, the doors and windows grated, vehicles parked haphazardly in the street and across the pavement. Streetlamps dusted the night with a gauzy white, the air steamy and thick. It was a poor neighborhood, Leala knew, but safer than the busy avenue.
After another ten minutes the houses and lots grew larger and their portals were ungrated. The flowers and palms seemed healthier and better-attended, and even through her fear Leala smelled the sweet perfume of jacaranda and bougainvillea.
She heard a roar at her back and saw headlights veer onto the street. Leala ducked into a yard, crouching behind a tall agave until the lights passed. Struck by a crisp and pungent scent, Leala crept toward a picket fence beside a dark house. Behind it was a blue hole centering the backyard with a long plank of wood projecting across water lit blue from beneath.
La piscina. A pool for swimming.
Leala had been smelling herself and her clothing. Shooting glances at the house, she slunk to the edge of the pool and splashed the clean-smelling water over her face. When the house remained dark she edged into the cool agua, dress and all, taking a deep breath and dipping her head beneath the surface, staying under as long as possible, coming up for air, then submerging again, hoping the bright-smelling water was cleaning the filth from her body and her soul and renewing her for the journey ahead.